Where icebergs are born: Getting schooled in the ways of Canada’s north on an Arctic cruise

We were supposed to visit three or four towns in Nunavut before sailing across the Davis Straight to Greenland, but there was fog, and ice, and we couldn’t get to more than two.

Matthew Swan owns Adventure Canada and was along for the ride on this July sailing aboard the Arctic Explorer. “There’s a reason we call this an expedition and not a cruise,” he says with a smile to the hundred or so of us in the lounge during one of his afternoon talks.

But Bernadette Dean, an Inuit teacher, translator and filmmaker who lives in Rankin Inlet, had a better take on it.

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During a talk about her father, Dean passed along some words of wisdom she learned from the 93-year-old. Sila isumaqsuqtutungmat means “the environment is the only one with total freedom.”

It’s the sort of thing that’s easy to forget when you’ve shelled out $5,000 or more a person on one of these trips of a lifetime. If this crowd had paid that kind of money for a cruise on the Rhône, they’d be steamed, possibly outraged at skipping bits of the itinerary they’ve been planning and thinking about for months.

Like any language, Inuktitut is a window onto how its speakers see the world, and though it’s a Canadian language, we don’t hear it much. Hearing her speak, and explain, opened up the North as much as scrambling up a tundra hillside had that morning.

And it may be one reason that, despite the drastically altered itinerary, there are nothing but smiles here.

It’s a special sort of person who spends this kind of money to see the Arctic, instead of tasting wine along the Mosel or skiing in Verbier or taking a luxury train across South Africa. This is a fascinating trip, but not a luxurious one for the price. The single beds are pretty firm, the wood and veneer detailing pretty ’70s, and the furniture would not be out of place on a 1980s CBC sitcom.

It turns out, these hundred happy people are a very big part of what make this trip as remarkable as it is. The fjords, the icebergs, the raw seal meat — those are all high on the list, too. But I expected that.

The conversations started on the chartered plane from Ottawa to Iqaluit with my seatmate Dennis, a Bay Street investment manager, about Mark Carney’s job at the Bank of England, the value of exporting Canadian regulation and bureaucracy and the dangers of deregulation. I’d never spoken with such a perspicacious Rob Ford supporter.

On board, it continued, three times a day, at breakfast, lunch and supper, as I played chat roulette and came up diamonds every time. I had conversations about Western misunderstandings of poverty in places like Addis Ababa and Calcutta, about the role peasant culture has played in Baltic nationalism and recent scandals regarding the traditional circumcision rituals of Mandela’s Xhosa tribe. These people were not only well travelled, but they seem to have spent long lives thinking about the places they’d been and the things they saw there.

But the most common conversations, and the most trenchant, were about the North and the Inuit. With the exception of one lawyer who consulted on the land claim that resulted in the establishment of the territory, presumably here to take a look at her handiwork, no one on board knew much about the four-fifths of the country above Edmonton we were exploring. But as the days went by, through formal talks by and information conversation with the four Inuk on board, we picked up bits of perspective, facts, opinions, and fleshed them out in what, by about halfway through the trip, had become a de facto symposium, played out over exquisitely prepared cod and Arctic char.

I dropped in on one Sunday breakfast conversation, which included a woman named Pinky, about the role of the seal hunt in Arctic economics. Most of us immediately agreed with the observation, made on deck earlier during a brief break in what had become a shipwide compulsion to take pictures of every one of the hundreds of icebergs we passed, that if one was OK with killing cows, one didn’t have a leg to stand on with seals. But some questioned just how important the relatively small number of seals was to the 40,000 Nunavimmiut (the word we’d learned for the people who live in Nunavut). Sure, Europe’s ban on seal products was foolish, especially since it seemed to be largely based on the cuteness of baby seals, which haven’t been hunted since the 1980s, but would lifting it have any real effect on the standard of living?

We were able to debate the issue, about which most of us had known nothing the week before, because we had just heard from Aaju Peter, a septilingual lawyer, member of the Order of Canada, a staunch supporter of the hunt who is also a seal skin clothing designer and from what we could tell, owner Matthew Swan’s girlfriend. She talked about the cultural and practical role the 100,000 or so seals hunted the previous year play, about how it remains in Nunavut a shared hunt, with hunters putting extra meat from seals, whales and the occasional polar bear into community freezers for families who have not had good hunts, or who have lost their hunters. She talked about the skins that women like her turn into clothing for family and for sale, stretching the low average incomes while helping them keep in touch with their eroded heritage. Her traditionally tattooed knuckles and face, this strong, bold, proud Inuk, helped to drive home not only the importance but the dramatic beauty of the Inuit. I was embarrassed that the Maori seemed more familiar to me than these Canadians.

By Wednesday night, we were crossing over to Greenland, where we would be shocked by the relative prosperity, towns of less than 2,000 with transit systems, whale blubber offered on plates made of local stone, served with beer brewed in the capital, Nuuk. Mealtime conversations turned to this difference. Iqaluit and Pangnirtung are set up like seasonal lumber camps, ugly houses built for marginal people; the roads aren’t even paved. There’s great beauty in Greenland.

Ilulissat, birthplace of most of the Atlantic’s icebergs, is more or less beyond description. But this remained a Canadian expedition in the profoundest possible sense. These are my people. This is my land. This is their land. I knew it. Now I’m closer to understanding it.

IF YOU GO

First, you have to get to Ottawa, gateway to the North. That’s where Adventure Canada’s chartered flight leaves from. If you want to increase the trip’s Canuck factor, take VIA rail to see the country chug by, especially if you’re coming from far away.

It’s not as cold as you think it is, so you can leave your Canada Goose parka behind. A Canadian-made Arc’teryx Sabre is what I used – plenty warm, and folds up nice and tiny. Bring some boots that are good for hiking and walking, something similarly lightweight and easily packable and dryable, like Teva’s scrunchable Chair 5s.

The expedition I took, one of many Adventure Canada offers, was called Arctic Explorer. There’s just one sailing of it in 2014, Aug. 2-12. This year’s price starts at about $4,000 per person. Some people I talked to onboard told me they’d booked the previous November. Better get cracking. Adventurecanada.com/trip.arctic-explorer-2014. 800-363-7566.

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